Ben Rothke
The problem with conspiracy theories[1] is that those who believe in them rarely consider the opposing viewpoint, even when presented with compelling evidence. For instance, when shown centuries of scientific evidence and thousands of scientific proofs demonstrating that the earth is spherical, flat earthers[2] won’t reply in kind with science and logic; they will claim that everyone at NASA is in on the lie.
Within Israeli society, one of the most tragic instances of conspiracy is known as the Yemenite children affair. This refers to the alleged disappearance of thousands of Yemenite children from new immigrant parents between 1948 and 1955. The conspiracy theory is that the Jewish Agency kidnapped babies from Yemenite mothers for adoption by childless Ashkenazi parents who were Holocaust survivors.
In The Yemenite Children Affair: Ethnic Tensions, Immigration, and Public Records in Israel (Lexington Books, 2024), editor Dr. Motti Inbari, Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina, has gathered numerous authorities with expertise in the topic in this fascinating and intriguing volume. Their overwhelming and compelling findings, supported by data (unlike the claims of Yemenite-children-affair conspiracy purveyors), is that there never was such a conspiracy. In fact, there was not a single illegal adoption.
The Yemenite children affair is one of the most painful allegations in Israeli society. Numerous Israeli investigations[3] have all shown there’s zero evidence to support the kidnapping conspiracy. Yet, surveys conducted in 2023 from Inbari and Dr. Kirill Bumin of Boston University showed that between 60%-70% of Israeli Jews believe most babies had not died but were stolen from their parents. In fact, the Yemenite children affair is one of the most investigated episodes in Israeli history.
A few common characteristics[4] of conspiracy theories, to which the Yemenite children affair is tailor-made, include that they locate the source of unusual social and political phenomena in unseen, intentional, and malevolent forces, often interpret political events as the struggle between good and evil, and suggest that mainstream reporting of public affairs is a ruse or an attempt to distract the public from a true source of power.
The Yemenite children affair, like many conspiracies, can be debunked by simply asking a few evidence-based questions. Some of them include:
- Why would Ashkenazi parents adopt sickly Yemenite babies in the first place?
- The conspiracy to transfer thousands of babies means thousands of adoptive parents participated in this. Why has not a single one come forward in almost 80 years?
- It would also require countless government officials, doctors, nurses, administrators, transporters, and more. Why has not a single one come forward in almost 80 years?
- An illegally adopted Yemenite child in an Ashkenazi family would stick out. Why has not a single one come forward in almost 80 years?
Even in cases where adoptees have been discovered, there has always been a backstory that disproves a conspiracy. For example, the New York Times 2019 story “The Disappeared Children of Israel”[5] details how Ofra Mazor, of Yemenite descent, had been looking for her sister for 30 years when she submitted her DNA samples to an Israeli genealogy company. A few months after submitting her DNA, Ms. Mazor received a call saying a match had been found. She discovered that a German-Jewish couple in Israel had adopted her sister, Varda Fuchs.
While the New York Times seems to have found a smoking gun, there was a backstory. Fuchs’s biological mother was 17 years old and unmarried when she became pregnant. She entered the hospital using an assumed name and fled the hospital after Varda was born. And after a month, the baby was turned over to the Fuchs, a childless couple. Varda Fuchs’s story was tragic, but it was not the smoking gun of the Yemenite children affair that it was made out to be. There was no government conspiracy of any sort – just a very embarrassed teenage, unwed mother.
While the conspiracy of the Yemenite children is without merit, the authors don’t deny the trials and tribulations the Yemenite immigrants went through in their early years in Israel. But it is a far cry and an illogical jump from the poor treatment of immigrants to the wholesale government-sanctioned kidnapping of their children.
The Yemenite children affair touches a deep nerve. A one-sided Al Jazeera[6] story on the topic, for instance, closes with Batya Yitzhaki in tears about her long-lost sister Rachel. Yet the authors of this remarkable book have focused on the facts and evidence without letting the story’s raw emotions get in the way.
What’s particularly fascinating about the Yemenite children affair is that it has been used, and one could say weaponized, by many different parts of Israeli society. The spectrum includes leftist NGOs such as The Amram Association, the late orthodox Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, the very far-right ultra-orthodox fringe Neturei Karta, and more.
Esther Meir-Glitzenstein is a professor at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev specializing in the history of Jews from Arab countries in the 20th century. Her chapter “A Continuous Tragedy: From Operation Magic Carpet to the Yemenite Children Affair” details the ghastly travels of Yemenite immigrants and what they had to go through to get from Yemen to Israel. To say their journeys were horrifying and appalling would be an understatement. And their status as dhimmis, second class citizens, in Yemen only exacerbated their experiences. Many Yemenite Jews traveled hundreds of miles, often by foot, to get to the airport in Aden, Yemen, getting robbed numerous times and arriving at Aden with absolutely nothing except the clothes they wore. The journey through the desert left many of them dead, with others arriving dehydrated, near death, and with infectious diseases.
When they arrived in the newly founded Israel, they found themselves in a highly underdeveloped country without the means to absorb tens of thousands of Yemenite immigrants. Due to the lack of suitable housing, the Yemenite immigrants were housed in transit camps (ma’abarot), which were tent cities. It’s worth noting that ma’abarot were ubiquitous in the early years of the state. Immigrants of many different nationalities, not just Yemenites, were housed in them.
The Hebrew word balagan means chaos, confusion, or disorder. That term perfectly describes the state of the transit camps. It was an extreme mess where illness, malnutrition, and overcrowding were rampant. Combine that with the high infant mortality rate, which was 30% in Yemen, and you have all the makings for a balagan.
In the chapter “Policy, Medicine, and Health Challenges during the Great Immigration to Israel in the 1950s,” Dorit Weiss and Shifra Shvarts, both from the Health Sciences department at Ben-Gurion University, detail the poor condition of the Israeli healthcare system in the early years of the state. Israel was lacking in medicine, hospital beds, doctors, nurses, and more. The public health challenges at the time were overwhelming. It was that state of affairs that the Yemenite immigrants found themselves in. Combine that with Yemenite mothers who had a significantly high infant mortality rate, in addition to having diseases such as dysentery, tuberculosis, malaria, and more, resulted in the tragic death of many Yemenite babies.
Private telephones were not standard anywhere in Israel during these years. This lack of telephones in the transit camps and hospitals led to poor communication between medical staff and patients. In short, it was a mess and a catastrophe on every level.
In the mid-1960s, many of the parents whose children had died were starting to get draft notices for their deceased children. This is roughly when allegations that their children never died started. Part of this was because death certificates were never issued in a few limited cases. While a very small number of the Yemenite children did go missing, the rest who disappeared, in fact, died in hospitals, had death certificates issued, and were buried.
The authors write that in many cases, the hospital staff had a condescending attitude toward the Yemenite parents. There were also language barriers, with the Yemenites speaking Arabic and not Hebrew. Many hospital staff were undoubtedly guilty of insensitivity and self-righteousness. But they certainly did not aid and abet in the kidnapping of Yemenite children.
Yet after all that, Dov Levitan of Ashkelon Academic College writes that not a single Yemenite child has been found for whom it can be determined with certainty, and by academic and legal standards, that they were kidnapped. Furthermore, there has not been a single case of a child who was reported to have died and a death certificate issued who later turned out to be alive.
Exacerbating the problem is that the Yemenite children affair was not correctly handled and investigated in the early years. This led to the creation of conspiracy theories that claim the Yemenite children were kidnapped, sold, smuggled, and adopted. Despite the conclusion of three Israeli commissions of inquiry on the topic and an additional parliamentary committee, the government and Israeli society are still forced to deal with this complex affair until today.
The book is a fascinating and engaging analysis of a painful topic. Inbari has gathered a large group of scholars with expertise in the topic and has written a fascinating analysis of the sad and tragic tale of the Yemenite children affair. The authors never deny that the Yemenite immigrants suffered, nor do they attempt to minimize or whitewash how terribly the immigrants were treated.
The Yemenite children affair took place in a massive balagan, in an undeveloped country unprepared to deal with a crisis. Add to that a class system, arrogance, power, cultural and language barriers, and more. This is an extraordinary emotional story dealing with innocent children born during a time of war and disease. It’s with emotions that conspiracy theories are born. Yet, the plethora of emotions can’t take away from the fact that there is no proof of a conspiracy or a single unauthorized adoption. In The Yemenite Children Affair: Ethnic Tensions, Immigration, and Public Records in Israel, the authors have compellingly shown that the notion of a conspiracy to kidnap Yemenite children should be yet another topic to be added to the list of conspiracy theories, heavy on dramatics and emotion, but lacking the slightest bit of evidence.
[1] See Ben Rothke, “The Most Important Thing You Can Ever Read about Conspiracy Theories,” Medium, April 5, 2020, https://brothke.medium.com/the-most-important-thing-you-can-ever-read-about-conspiracy-theories-a38f568f9e4c.
[2] See Ben Rothke, “An Experiment that will Shake every Flat Earth Doctrine Believer to their Core,” Medium, February 19, 2020, https://brothke.medium.com/a-simple-experiment-that-can-prove-the-earth-is-flat-b354ca12220f.
[3] Minkovski-Bahlul Commission (1967), Cohen-Kedmi Commission (1995), and Shalgi Commission (1988).
[4] See Christina Georgacopoulos, “Why We Fall for Conspiracies,” LSU.edu (February 2020), https://faculty.lsu.edu/fakenews/about/rumors.php.
[5] Malin Fezehai, “The Disappeared Children of Israel,” New York Times, February 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/middleeast/israel-yemenite-children-affair.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/middleeast/israel-yemenite-children-affair.html.
[6] “Israel: The Yemenite Children Affair,”, Al Jazeera World (October 22, 2024), https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-world/2024/10/22/israel-the-yemenite-children-affair.
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